Sunday Morning

Stevens first published “Sunday Morning” in Poetry magazine in 1915, albeit in a somewhat abbreviated and altered form than he eventually published in his book Harmonium (1923). At the time, the Western world was going through a number of upheavals, including ideological shifts. The eruption of the first World War in 1914 shattered the prevailing Western view of its own civilization: namely, that continued advancement in their society was reaching nearly into utopia. When Europe exploded into all-out war, fought in a bloody brutality of technological advancements in weaponry, vehicles, and trench-oriented tactics, all manner of cultural assumptions were challenged. While Christianity was no longer the unshaking political and cultural force it was in the West prior to the Renaissance, its worldview was still by and large the dominant one in Western culture.

It is on this stage of upheaval and disillusionment that Stevens writes and publishes “Sunday Morning.” While the poem was certainly not published in an era where Stevens could have been accused of heresy or found himself in danger for criticizing the church’s views, it was published at the forefront of a gradual shift in American thought that followed the harsh imaginative break of World War I.